Review: ‘Seconds Apart’

The most offbeat and ambitious of the five After Dark Originals playing briefly as a theatrical unit before home-format release, “Seconds Apart” centers on identical twins who look like Diane Arbus subjects (or “Omen II” Damiens). Supernaturally able to control behavior, they trigger “self-inflicted” harm on anyone they dislike. Macabre if uneven Louisiana-shot horror-meller should divert genre fans in various territories.

First seen willing four jocks at a party into playing everybody-dies Russian roulette, Jonas (Edmund Entin) and Seth (Gary Entin) are sinister siblings nobody likes, save their own creepy parents (Morgana Shaw, Louis Herthum). Their secretive ongoing project involves making people do extreme, usually fatal things so they themselves can feel something, anything. Such hijinks are threatened by a nosy police detective (Orlando Jones) with his own secret, and a new classmate (Samantha Droke) who stirs Jonas’ softer side. Script by George Richards (who also penned Mario Van Peebles’ recent drama “Black, White and Blues”) hashes out its various ideas in somewhat jumbled fashion. But at least it has ideas, and Colombia-born helmer Antonio Negret lends his sophomore feature (after 2007’s “Towards Darkness”) some visual panache.